King approves Imbali Foundation

MANTENGA – His Majesty King Mswati III has approved the Imbali Foundation.

The foundation is a brainchild of Princess Sikhanyiso who also serves as its patron. Her Royal Highness disclosed this during a press conference held at Mantenga Cultural Village on Thursday.

She said the aim of the foundation was to preserve the ‘sweetness’ of the girl child. To explain her point she used an analogy of how a bee enjoys the flower with the sweetest nectar and how they create layers (emakhekheba) from which honey is produced.

“We want to emphasise the Swazi culture to young girls and the importance of preserving themselves until marriage. We intend to take this particular conversation to their communities and teach them how to use Swazi culture to deal with the modern problems,” she said.

Princess Sikhanyiso further empha-sised that the Imbali Foundation was not created to compete with existing non-governmental organisations such as Save the Children Organisation or UNICEF but would rather complement these organisations.The foundation also has the backing of several companies from Dubai which have pledged to supply the foundation with electronic equipment while others have pledged to supply sporting and medical equipment.

Strongest

“Some of our strongest partners include Limkokwing University of Creative Technology, the Science and Biotechnology Park, Nedbank, MTN and SPTC. Their Royal Highnesses Prince Masitsela and Princess Tfobi are also part of this project, an Italian Count and Honorary Consul Richard Tilley,” she said.

She added that she anticipated that more players in the business community would jump on board this exciting new project which would allow them to make an impact in the lives of the girl child at community level.She stated that the dream for a foundation such as this had been a lifelong passion of hers because she had been mentoring young girls for a long time.

“Whatever God puts in my heart is the direction I take. I presented this idea to His Majesty in March and he supported it and told me not to keep it a personal and private thing but encouraged me to make it national,” she said.

Princess Sikhanyiso said some of the things she hoped to achieve was the eradication of certain accepted societal norms such as the girl child believing she is inferior to her male counterparts and should, therefore, be accepting abuse in its varying forms.